The data deluge is upon us: 2.5 quintillion bytes (that’s 10 to the 18^th power!) of data are created each day, and 90% of the data worldwide has been generated in just the past two years alone, according to a study by International Business Machines (IBM). By 2020, 50 times more product data will have been created. The term Big Data get bandied about a lot in the tech world, but these are some seriously large numbers.

What are organizations to do with all of this data? It’s useless unless it can be sorted and analyzed for important operational clues and trends. This is where analytics software comes in: it’s used to make critical business decisions based off all of this data.

For Tableau Software (DATA), one of the emerging, independent providers of enterprise analytics solutions, it’s all about bringing Big Data down to the desktop.

The company’s goal is to enable users to better interact with data (and get more out of it) by adding a visual element. Quite simply, Tableau takes data analysis out of the boring spreadsheet world and moves it into an environment that is much more user friendly.

Older business intelligence (BI) technology (offered by the traditional enterprise software vendors) is far too complicated, inflexible, unchanging and expensive, according to Tableau CEO Christian Chabot. Tableau competes on two things: speed and ease of use.

Most buyers of Tableau solutions are not even using any of the traditional BI offerings; they’re just plugging numbers into spreadsheets.

Tableau offers a broader range of users better access to much richer images of all of the data collected across an organization, resulting in improved decision making. Users can be connected and visualizing data within minutes. Tableau’s drag-and-drop interface is simple, with no programming skills needed. Users can publish a dashboard of results with just a few clicks and then share it live on the Web and on mobile devices. Smart dashboards, combining multiple views of data, can be created and shared as well.

Tableau’s land-and-expand strategy brings in new customers from the Web via a 14-day free trial. Once a customer is converted (the average initial order size is less than $10,000), Tableau’s expansion sales teams then work to drive more business within a department or across an organization.

For example, one Tableau customer, a Fortune 50 bank, started with just four copies of Tableau Desktop five years ago, and since then has done 300 transactions and spent $2.5 million with the company.

Tableau software traditionally has been an on-premise offering, with the argument being that many customers have a lot of data sitting behind a firewall and are not interested in moving to the cloud because of security concerns. But Tableau management believes there is room for analytics to be offered via the cloud in addition to the traditional license model.

The company’s cloud-based Tableau Online offering, a hosted version of Tableau Server (the core BI application), is quickly adding new customers. Whereas Server has a license fee of $10,000 for 10 users, Tableau Online costs $500 per user annually.

The key for Tableau Online is its mobile focus: dashboards can be accessed via any Web browser or tablet. While the data is secure, it sits outside of the firewall, making it easier to collaborate with partners and customers. According to Tableau management, some customers are using a combination of Server and Online for users in different divisions.

Tableau solutions have various use cases in a number of verticals. For example, consumer packaged goods (CPG) data is uniquely challenging because it’s constantly changing. This means static reports are useless and traditional BI tools too inflexible when it comes to providing meaningful analysis. Tableau’s visual dashboards provide quick insights into on-shelf product availability, which can help CPG customers limit costly out-of-stock situations. Users can also test promotion effectiveness and study price elasticity of different products across different retailers.

In the healthcare vertical, Tableau allows customers to identify patterns of cost and profitability in order to better allocate resources. Hospitals deploy Tableau to more easily understand patient flow and then streamline the process to increase efficiency. Patterns of cost and profitability are identified by admission method and specialty. Tableau’s solutions are even used by healthcare facilities for long-term planning purposes: By analyzing local demographic trends, hospitals are able to anticipate staffing needs and target neighborhood outreach programs.

Given the vast opportunity to pull market share away from traditional BI vendors, Tableau has the ability to continue growing at a rapid pace over the next few years. In the second quarter, Tableau’s revenue advanced 82%, with license revenue up 80% and deferred revenue gaining 84%. The company in Q2 added more than 2,200 new accounts, and now has more than 21,000 customers, up 56% from a year ago.

For 2014, the consensus revenue estimate of $373.4 million indicates growth of nearly 61%. At a recent price of $68.03, Tableau’s market cap of $4.67 billion is 9.1 times the 2015 consensus revenue estimate of $510 million (estimated growth of 36.6%). Some analysts are even more positive on the growth outlook for next year: the 2015 Street-high revenue estimate is $580 million.

With the recent sharp volatility across the entire tech sector, Tableau shares (from a technical perspective) have near-term downside risk into the upper-$50s. The stock is on my watch list as a potential addition to the Next Wave portfolio; I would prefer to add it at a more attractive valuation.